Another traditional criticism of the argument (first found in Gassendi's Objections to Descartes' Meditations, and later modified by Kant) is that existence is not a perfection, because existence is not a property as such, and that referring to it as a property confuses the distinction between a concept of something and the thing itself.

An eighth criticism of Anselm's argument attacks the premise which implies that one must conceive of the greatest conceivable being (God.) The criticism is that the greatest conceivable being is in fact inconceivable, as it lacks a required property of the GCB, existence outside of the mind.

Descartes often compares the ontologicalargument to a geometric demonstration, arguing that necessary existence cannot be excluded from idea of God anymore than the fact that its angles equal two right angles, for example, can be excluded from the idea of a triangle.

Descartes does not conceive the ontologicalargument on the model of an Euclidean or axiomatic proof, in which theorems are derived from epistemically prior axioms and definitions.

Since the ontologicalargument ultimately reduces to an axiom, the source of an objection according to Descartes' diagnosis is the failure of the objector to perceive this axiom clearly and distinctly.

Ontologicalarguments are arguments, for the conclusion that God exists, from premises which are supposed to derive from some source other than observation of the world — e.g., from reason alone.

Intimations of a defensible mereological ontologicalargument, albeit one whose conclusion is not (obviously) endowed with religious significance.

For many positive ontologicalarguments, there are parodies which purport to establish the non-existence of god(s); and for many positive ontologicalarguments there are lots (usually a large infinity!) of similar arguments which purport to establish the existence of lots (usally a large infinity) of distinct god-like beings.

The ontologicalargument for the existence of God was first structured in the Proslogion of Saint Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1033-1109 A.D.); though it was actually Immanuel Kant, an 18th century German philosopher, who first called the argument“ontological.”Ontology is a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being.

Gaunilo (who was a monk of Marmoutier and a contemporary of Anselm’s) criticized Anselm’s argument saying that one could apply the statement to a lot of things, the most famous example he used was, “the greatest conceivable island” and prove the existence of the island using parallel reasoning of Anselm’s ontologicalargument.

Of the two ontologicalarguments, this response is perhaps most useful in arguing for premise 3 in the reductio ad absurdum approach.

We can show that the classic ontologicalargument fails by keeping the erroneous second premise and replacing the first one with: "Utopia is the most perfect ('the greatest') society conceivable." The parallel conclusion that Utopia (or "the greatest car," or whatever) must exist is clearly false.

An overview of the major ontologicalarguments for the existence of a god, that is, arguments drawn from analytic, a priori premises rather than observations of the natural world.

Oppy provides a "general ground" for rejecting modal theistic arguments, arguments for the existence of God which makes use of the premise that God is a being who exists in every possible world.

Ontologicalarguments, Gödel's in particular, are natural examples of intensional logic at work.

Ontologicalarguments seek to establish the existence of God based on pure logic: the principles of reasoning require that God be part of ones ontology."

That some philosophers have taken the word 'existence' to stand for a predicate in the logical sense, i.e., for an attribute, may be seen from their use of the ontologicalargument to prove the existence of God.

If taken literally, St. Anselm's answer looks as if he admits his critic's argument because he talks about the imperfect pointing to the perfect as this would mean to hint God's existence through the creation, instead of proving it through the reason only as the ontologicalargument was supposed to do.

With this line of reasoning then, we can claim that the inference of the ontologicalargument is a legitimate and inevitable deduction from the premises as in the correct syllogisms, not a question begging one.

Now, the ontologicalargument would be correct if existence was taken as a single reality as in the sufi and Ishraq schools, not a secondary quality.

Gaunilo establishes an apparently parallel ontologicalargument in which the question is not the existence of God, but rather the existence of a most perfect island.

The second stage in his ontologicalargument provides Anslem with his response to Gaunilo, and it extends from just this point: the idea which is lacking in the concept of a perfect island is its necessary existence.

Anselm's ontologicalargument is a syllogistic tautology which attempts to prove that God exists, but does so a priori and not from a premise which can be demonstrated apaprt from faith.

For example, the "fine-tuning" version of the design argument depends on empirical evidence of intelligent design; in particular, it turns on the empirical claim that, as a nomological matter, life could not have developed had certain fundamental properties of the universe differed even slightly from what they are.

In contrast, the ontologicalarguments are conceptual in roughly the following sense: just as the propositions constituting the concept of a bachelor imply that every bachelor is male, the propositions constituting the concept of God, according to the ontologicalargument, imply that God exists.

The ontologicalargument, then, is unique among such arguments in that it purports to establish the real (as opposed to abstract) existence of some entity.

However, a deeper reason for Gödel's contribution to the ontologicalargument is that the most sophisticated versions of the ontologicalargument are nowadays written in terms of modal logic, a branch of logic that was familiar to the medieval scholastics, and axiomatized by C.

Some of the pioneering work of Kurt Gödel showed that the modal logic of philosophers which was used to analyse the ontologicalargument for the existence of God was also very useful in proof theory and metamathematics.

For example, an argument based upon the possible consequences of Napoleon winning at Waterloo, should not be able to assume that the laws of physics are also changed.

And that is why the arguments by which you attempt to prove the contrary either are not true or what you think follows from them does not follow from them at all.

You often picture me as offering this argument: Because what is greater than all other things exists in the understanding, it must also exist in reality or else the being which is greater than all others would not be such.

Anselm goes on to present his standard argument that the nonexistence of such a being is inconceivable.

If we restrict ourselves to first-order logic, then indeed, the ontologicalargument cannot be formulated within it: but that may reveal an inadequacy in first-order logic rather than in the ontologicalargument itself.

At this point the ontologicalargument begins to merge with the cosmological argument.

The OntologicalArgument has protreptic force: it bids us be serieux; reality, ultimate reality, exists, and once we recognise that fact, it is reasonable to accept the invitation to join in the metaphysical quest.

users.ox.ac.uk /~jrlucas/ontolarg.html (2977 words)

The Ontological Argument(Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-22)

's ontologicalargument purports to be an a priori proof of God's existence.

What follows is an attempt to clarify the argument as it is presented in Chapter II of the Proslogium.

If you think that the argument is not a good one, you are under an obligation to say where it goes wrong.

Abstract: Anselms's OntologicalArgument is stated, and a few standard objections to his argument are listed.

The general idea of the ontologicalargument is based on the notion that the concept of God as the greatest being implies that God exists—if not, there could be something greater, namely an existent greatest being—but this being would be God.

If we can construct a similar argument to a given argument with the same form as the original with true premisses and a false conclusion, then the given argument is also shown to be invalid.)

Anselm’s ontologicalargument has the form of a reductio ad absurdum, which means that it takes a hypothesis, shows that it has absurd or otherwise unacceptable implications, and so concludes that the hypothesis is false.

In the case of Anselm’s ontologicalargument, the hypothesis treated in this way is the hypothesis that God does not exist.

Anselm’s argument rests upon the conception of God as “that than which no greater can be conceived”.

Descartes's fifth Meditationargument for God's existence relies on an untenable notion that existence is a perfection and that it can be predicated of God.

In effect, the follower of Descartes's argument is tricked, for if he or she agrees with the foundational premises for the sake of the argument (that existence is predicated of a most perfect being), then there is no choice left but to conclude that God exists.

Further, Descartes's argument builds into his premises the conclusion that he is trying to demonstrate, namely that a most-perfect being must exist in order to be a most-perfect being.

As formulated by Anselm, the ontologicalargument begins with a notion of "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." Anything that satisfies this concept must exist in reality as well as in thought (since otherwise it would be possible to conceive something greaterone that really exists); hence, god exists.

Descartes endorsed a different version of this argument, and Spinoza also relied upon it, but Kant rejected it because of the unintelligibility of comparing the relative greatness of real and merely possible beings.

Thus, the "ontological commitments" of a philosophical position include both its explicit assertions and its implicit presuppositions about the existence of entities, substances, or beings of particular kinds.